Conventional approaches to purchasing items to offer to customers rely heavily on manual budgeting and planning, without a standardized process that works across various categories of items. In particular, types of items that fall under a retail “soft lines” category or product line, which can include items such as apparel, watches, jewelry, footwear, and sporting goods, are often handled inconsistently even across the same department of a retailer. For example, there can be many different buyers for an apparel category who, for each season, have to set or obtain a fixed budget, then manually allocate that budget over the various types or styles of item that the buyer thinks will sell well during a particular season. The person allocating the budget will generally set an amount for a vendor or category of item, but will not set budgets for particular styles within that category or for that vendor. Thus, even when the buyer has printouts or spreadsheets with various budgeting numbers or other such information, the buyer must attempt to allocate the budget over the styles that the buyer thinks will do well based upon a “touch and feel” approach the buyer gets at a fashion show, vendor presentation, etc. Since each buyer will have different tastes and preferences, the budget will be allocated differently among the various buyers. There is currently no way to determine and update budgets and allocations at these various levels of granularity in real time based upon current data, and enable buyers, vendors, and other such entities to access, query, and update that information in the field as needed. Further, there is no centralized way to ensure that the approaches to budgeting and allocations are applied consistently across various product lines or types of item, or across periods of time for the same product line or type of item.